What: /dev/kmsg Date: Mai 2012 KernelVersion: 3.5 Contact: Kay Sievers Description: The /dev/kmsg character device node provides userspace access to the kernel's printk buffer. Injecting messages: Every write() to the opened device node places a log entry in the kernel's printk buffer. The logged line can be prefixed with a syslog prefix, which carries the syslog priority and facility. The single decimal prefix number is composed of the 3 lowest bits being the syslog priority and the next 8 bits the syslog facility number. If no prefix is given, the priority number is the default kernel log priority and the facility number is set to LOG_USER (1). It is not possible to inject messages from userspace with the facility number LOG_KERN (0), to make sure that the origin of the messages can always be reliably determined. Accessing the buffer: Every read() from the opened device node receives one record of the kernel's printk buffer. The first read() directly following an open() always returns first message in the buffer; there is no kernel-internal persistent state; many readers can concurrently open the device and read from it, without affecting other readers. Every read() will receive the next available record. If no more records are available read() will block, or if O_NONBLOCK is used -EAGAIN returned. Messages in the record ring buffer get overwritten as whole, there are never partial messages received by read(). In case messages get overwritten in the circular buffer while the device is kept open, the next read() will return -EPIPE, and the seek position be updated to the next available record. Subsequent reads() will return available records again. Unlike the classic syslog() interface, the 64 bit record sequence numbers allow to calculate the amount of lost messages, in case the buffer gets overwritten. And they allow to reconnect to the buffer and reconstruct the read position if needed, without limiting the interface to a single reader. The device supports seek with the following parameters: SEEK_SET, 0 seek to the first entry in the buffer SEEK_END, 0 seek after the last entry in the buffer SEEK_DATA, 0 seek after the last record available at the time the last SYSLOG_ACTION_CLEAR was issued. Other seek operations or offsets are not supported because of the special behavior this device has. The device allows to read or write only whole variable length messages (records) that are stored in a ring buffer. Because of the non-standard behavior also the error values are non-standard. -ESPIPE is returned for non-zero offset. -EINVAL is returned for other operations, e.g. SEEK_CUR. This behavior and values are historical and could not be modified without the risk of breaking userspace. The output format consists of a prefix carrying the syslog prefix including priority and facility, the 64 bit message sequence number and the monotonic timestamp in microseconds, and a flag field. All fields are separated by a ','. Future extensions might add more comma separated values before the terminating ';'. Unknown fields and values should be gracefully ignored. The human readable text string starts directly after the ';' and is terminated by a '\n'. Untrusted values derived from hardware or other facilities are printed, therefore all non-printable characters and '\' itself in the log message are escaped by "\x00" C-style hex encoding. A line starting with ' ', is a continuation line, adding key/value pairs to the log message, which provide the machine readable context of the message, for reliable processing in userspace. Example:: 7,160,424069,-;pci_root PNP0A03:00: host bridge window [io 0x0000-0x0cf7] (ignored) SUBSYSTEM=acpi DEVICE=+acpi:PNP0A03:00 6,339,5140900,-;NET: Registered protocol family 10 30,340,5690716,-;udevd[80]: starting version 181 The DEVICE= key uniquely identifies devices the following way: ============ ================= b12:8 block dev_t c127:3 char dev_t n8 netdev ifindex +sound:card0 subsystem:devname ============ ================= The flags field carries '-' by default. A 'c' indicates a fragment of a line. Note, that these hints about continuation lines are not necessarily correct, and the stream could be interleaved with unrelated messages, but merging the lines in the output usually produces better human readable results. A similar logic is used internally when messages are printed to the console, /proc/kmsg or the syslog() syscall. By default, kernel tries to avoid fragments by concatenating when it can and fragments are rare; however, when extended console support is enabled, the in-kernel concatenation is disabled and /dev/kmsg output will contain more fragments. If the log consumer performs concatenation, the end result should be the same. In the future, the in-kernel concatenation may be removed entirely and /dev/kmsg users are recommended to implement fragment handling. Users: dmesg(1), userspace kernel log consumers